Huntington Beach, a non-compliant city on state housing goals.

California’s new governor is coming out firing on housing. First, Gov. Newsom’s proposed budget threatened to deprive cities of gas tax money if they don’t allow more housing to be built. And now today he’s suing Orange County’s Huntington Beach, population 200,000, for lack of compliance with state housing laws.

Technically, he’s not actually filing the lawsuit. Instead, he’s referring the case to the state’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, thanks to a relatively new state law, AB 72 (Santiago, 2017), which empowers such a lawsuit to be filed over local government intransigence on housing.

So why the need for the lawsuit? According to the San Francisco Chronicle, NIMBY influence on Huntington Beach’s city council caused the city to fall more than 400 units behind its state targets on housing, after city leaders scaled back approval of a high-density development in 2015. That proposal that would have otherwise allowed the city to comply with its housing target.

According to the state, in the three years since the rejection, the city has “taken no action to bring the housing element into compliance.” The city must now build 533 low-income housing units by the end of 2021 to meet updated state quotas.

In the old days, this lack of compliance would have been met with…nothing. There was essentially no penalty for non-compliance, and even when cities or counties complied, they often negotiated down their requirements to trivial amounts of housing or gamed the system in other ways to avoid having to make meaningful changes to their land use rules. But starting with SB 375 (Steinberg, 2008), which linked transportation funding to compliance, up through AB 72, the state has gotten more serious.

Which brings us to today’s lawsuit. It is a big deal, and not just for the potential impact on Huntington Beach’s land use policies, which will have to change if the suit is successful. More significantly, this lawsuit will be a wake-up call to cities across the state, motivating them to action on housing and also providing political cover for municipal leaders who know they need to do more to allow housing but are fearful (and captured by) their NIMBY constituents.

Furthermore, this probably won’t be the end of the lawsuits. According to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, at least four dozen other California cities also have not received state approval of their housing elements, as of the beginning of the year. Newsom is reportedly considering additional litigation against them.

So we can expect Newsom and Attorney General Becerra to be busy on housing in the coming months and beyond, ushering in a more combative era in the state’s effort to get local governments to allow new homes in their communities.